Breaking Rank (36 page)

But those numbers don't tell the real story. Police work is a very risky business. One that records over 57,000 assaults on police officers each year, resulting in thousands of injuries. It is also
the
most “emotionally dangerous” occupation in the country. Air traffic controllers might mount a good case, but when's the last time you heard of one of them getting shot on duty? Tree cutting may produce a higher death rate, but mortality on the job is less “personal”—like falling from seventy feet up (and hitting the ground at forty-six miles an hour) versus being shot to death.

Police officers live with the possibility of sudden, violent death every moment of their working lives.

On a Sunday afternoon, six and a half months after slain police officers Timothy Ruopp and Kimberly Tonahill were buried (see
chapter 4
), a San Diego patrol officer stopped several young black men in Encanto, a neighborhood in southeast San Diego. A scuffle broke out between Officer Donovan Jacobs and twenty-three-year-old Sagon Penn, a martial arts expert. The two fell to the ground. Jacobs jumped on the suspect's chest. Moments later, SDPD agent Tom Riggs, in the company of a civilian ride-along, Sarah Peña Ruiz, showed up to help. Penn, flat on his back, wrestled Jacobs's pistol from its holster, knocked the officer back, and fired at Riggs who was approaching from several feet away. Riggs fell to the ground. Penn then turned and shot Jacobs. As both officers lay wounded, Penn walked to Riggs's car where he saw Peña Ruiz seated on the passenger side. He reached into the car and shot her. He then got into Jacobs's police car, drove over Jacobs's wounded body, and sped to his grandfather's house.

I was having dinner with a friend in North Park when I got the page. Twenty minutes later I was at the scene. The life-flight helicopter had just landed, its blades still rotating. Firefighters and medics hovered over Riggs. They gave him CPR, bandaged him, filled him full of tubes, lifted him onto a gurney. As they made their way past me, I brushed my hand over his head. “Tommy” was the son of Charlie Riggs, one of my sergeants at the academy back in the seventies. Charlie's boy did not look good.

Appearances can be deceiving, I told myself. But years of observing near-dead bodies offered little hope. Still, I prayed and prayed for him to pull through.

I was about halfway to the hospital when I got word that Riggs was DOA. I changed direction and headed toward the east county hospital where Jacobs lay in critical condition. One officer was already gone, there seemed to be little hope the other would make it. I stood by Jacobs's bed for hours, making somber small talk with the cops who penetrated, one or two at a time, the hospital's protocol. Sometime after midnight the officer's condition improved. Doctors were guardedly hopeful.

I drove home to Solana Beach, heartsick once again. The day's toll: one cop deceased, another in critical condition, run over by his own car and left
for dead, an innocent observer who, while she would survive her flesh wound, would never be the same.
*

Three days later I met with my captains in a sun-drenched conference room in Qualcom Stadium. I hadn't slept much in the past seventy-two hours. I was anxious, afraid that Tommy's death would not be the last, that the next was just around the corner.

The city was in the middle of a long run of officer fatalities: ten killed in the line of duty in eight years, the highest mortality rate for any police department in the country. Privately, I'd come to the conclusion that too many of our cops were simply unfit for the job. That's not a judgment you announce to your officers, but deep in my heart I knew it to be true. And I felt personally responsible. I was the patrol chief during the time that three of those cops went down. And I'd taught all ten at the academy.

In truth, several of the officers hadn't stood a chance. Ron Ebeltoft and Keith Tiffany were ambushed in 1981 when they responded to a neighborhood dispute. They'd just gotten out of their cars when they were dropped in their tracks by a mentally disturbed man with a high-powered rifle (who'd been warring with a neighbor over a rosebush and a property line). Kirk Johnson had pulled up next to a parked San Diego sheriff's vehicle for a friendly, cross-jurisdictional chat when without warning he was shot in the face. Behind the wheel of the sheriff's car: the joyriding seventeen-year-old stepson of a sheriff's sergeant who'd dressed up in his stepdaddy's uniform, including a .357 magnum revolver. The kid had panicked when the PD unit pulled up alongside him.

But what of the others? Patrol Officer Dennis Allen had been fooled into thinking a suspect was armed with only a knife when the man pulled
a handgun from the back of his waistband and shot him dead.
*
And Ruopp and Tonahill in Grape Street Park? Had those two officers been adequately trained? Were they guided by sound policies and procedures? Were they equipped properly? Were they sufficiently alert? Had they practiced sound safety procedures that awful night?
No.
No to each question. Their deaths could easily have been prevented. I was certain of it. I took it out on my captains.

“Look, goddamn it, these officers work for you! Are they
trained
and
equipped
and
able
to do the job? Do you
know
them? Do you know their strengths, their weaknesses? Do you have confidence in them?” Their blank expressions only made me angrier. “Consider this an order: Every cop who works for you
will
have the street smarts, the mental toughness, the physical fitness and upper-body strength for this job.
Your
job is to see to it that each and every one of your cops makes it home at end of shift. Understood?”

Upper-body strength?
What else was that but a reference to women officers? It was, in fact, an implicit reference to Kimberly Tonahill. (A lot of our people never knew what the chief and I had learned the night we went to the Tonahill residence to give her mom the news. Kimberly had been to two funerals within a week's time, the second on the day of her own death, two of her dearest friends having committed suicide. Don't let anyone tell you a cop can just “shake off” something like that and hit the streets fully alert. Cops are human, like everyone else.) Was Tonahill strong enough and tough enough to be on duty that night? Was she strong enough and tough enough to be a cop? I had my doubts.

I bow to no one in my support for women police officers. But I wanted my captains to understand that under no circumstances was it okay to put a cop out there who couldn't pull his—or her—own weight.

After the meeting Winston Yetta, my central division captain, approached me. Yetta was one of my favorite people. We'd worked the same beat on overlapping watches when I was a rookie. He'd taught me a
lot about
good
police work, especially how to talk to people. He evidently thought it was time for remedial training.

“You're not the only one hurting, you know.”

“What?”

“We're
all
hurting.”

I apologized to Yetta, and later to my other captains. But, this was no time for a pity party—or a guilt fest. It was time to stop our cops from getting killed.

Bill Kolender accepted my proposal for an officer safety task force. A big one, with dozens of police officers, defensive tactics and firearms instructors, civilian analysts, legal experts—a total of eighty-five members. We would break down into groups and examine in detail every facet of officer safety and survival: the department's philosophy of policing; policies and procedures; whom we were hiring, and why and how; staffing levels and scheduling; safety equipment; training; safety inspections and controls; and critical incident critiques. We all took the pledge in our search for truth: no sacred cows; no getting defensive; egos and ranks checked at the door.

Every subject was critical, but none raised more hackles than “department philosophy.”

Shortly after Kolender became chief in the mid-1970s, the senior staff went off for a retreat. They affirmed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, their commitment to a “humanistic” approach to policing, to “community-oriented” and “participatory” management of the department, to an “open” style of communication and decision making.

Even though as a captain I hadn't been invited to the Big Boys' retreat, I'd worked closely with Bob Burgreen, a deputy chief at the time, and with Kolender. Kolender was my “patron.” I was his unofficial speechwriter, composing eulogies for fallen officers, and his not very secret confidant. We three were among the most “liberal” cops in the country. Our enlightened
philosophy had found its way into training syllabi, department policies and procedures, just about everything official. And our open, humanistic, progressive worldview had become the “company line.” What did the rank and file think of all this? They thought it was all a bunch of happy horseshit.

It was no surprise when the first meeting of the philosophy committee exploded into angry denunciations of department policies—and of those of us who wrote or promoted them: We were more interested in “PR” than officer safety; we automatically took the side of citizens who beefed cops for aggressive crime fighting; we bent over backward to protect the civil liberties of pukes, assholes, hairballs, and assorted other lowlifes—even as we would sell out a cop in a heartbeat; we handcuffed our officers with restrictions on use of force, and on force-reporting requirements; we deadened their enthusiasm with nitpicking discipline; we mortified them in the eyes of their peers in other agencies with all our non-cop fancy talk of “community” this and “humanistic” that. Daryl Gates—now there was a
real
police chief. And LAPD—there was a
real
police department.